Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday February 29, 2008 @10:31PM
from the it-all-sounds-like-dirty-pool-to-me dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The judge in the Wikileaks case has dissolved the injunction against Wikileaks, which means that it can get its .org domain back. He defended his prior ruling because it was based on the pittance of information the bank and registrar had provided him, saying 'This is a case in which we had a (dispute) with named parties, and the parties were duly served. One of which properly responded and came to this court with a proposed settlement in this lawsuit... Nobody filed any timely responses to the court's order.'"

Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday February 29, 2008 @05:19PM
from the stay-on-target dept.

SpaceAdmiral writes to mention that NASA has some new high-resolution radar maps of the Moon obtained by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The new images have also been used to create a simulation of the Moon's day and a movie of a Moon landing from the point of view of the astronaut. "NASA is eying the Moon's south polar region as a possible site for future outposts. The location has many advantages; for one thing, there is evidence of water frozen in deep dark south polar craters. Water can be split into oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to burn as rocket fuel--or astronauts could simply drink it. Planners are also looking for 'peaks of eternal light.' Tall polar mountains where the sun never sets might be a good place for a solar power station."

Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday February 29, 2008 @04:36PM
from the embrace-extend-extiguish dept.

yorugua writes "Furniture trembled as Steve Ballmer was to be interviewed by InformationWeek. He then went on to talk about Linux: 'How does Microsoft beat Linux? The same way "you beat any other competitor: You offer good value, which in this case means good total cost of ownership," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says.', Embrace-Extend-Extinguish: 'We say when we embrace standards, we'll be transparent about how we're embracing standards. [...] If we have deviations, we'll be transparent about the deviations.'"

Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday February 29, 2008 @03:54PM
from the moves-of-desperation dept.

netbuzz writes "Lawyers for the Swiss bank that got the plug pulled on Wikileaks.org have dragged a Stanford grad student/human rights activist into the case because he moderated a discussion group about Wikileaks on Facebook. He has no relation to Wikileaks or the case, other than that he helped authenticate documents — completely unrelated to the bank matter — that were posted on Wikileaks. The guy and his lawyer have done a nice job of making lemonade out of this lemon, though."

Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday February 29, 2008 @02:27PM
from the asking-for-trouble-and-giving-the-rest-of-us-a-bad-name dept.

Wired has an interesting editorial on the latest resurgence of the old days of phone phreaking and the latest phreak that is rising into the FBI crosshairs. The most recent hoax, "swatting", involves malicious pranksters calling police with reports of fake murders, hostage crises, or the like and spoofing the call to appear as though it was from another location. "Now the FBI thinks it has identified the culprit in the Colorado swatting as a 17-year-old East Boston phone phreak known as "Li'l Hacker." Because he's underage, Wired.com is not reporting Li'l Hacker's last name. His first name is Matthew, and he poses a unique challenge to the federal justice system, because he is blind from birth. If he's guilty, the attack is at once the least sophisticated and most malicious of a string of capers linked to Matt, who stumbled into the lingering remains of the decades-old subculture of phone phreaking when he was 14, and quickly rose to become one of the most skilled active phreakers alive."

An anonymous reader writes: Sony, which launched the consoles a year ago, sold 183,217 PS3 in Japan in the four weeks to November 25, topping sales of 159,193 Wii consoles, according to game magazine publisher Enterbrain, a key watcher of trends in the sector.
Analysts said the latest data was encouraging for the prospects of the PS3, but it was too early to paint a rosy picture for the Sony machine.

Seumas writes: "Jack Valenti, who served as president of the Motion Picture Association of America for nearly four decades, has suffered a stroke and has been taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, officials said. Valenti was central to creating the MPAA rating system — now G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17 — as a way to rate films as appropriate for certain age groups."